The way we see our world: OPTIMISM & PESSIMISM

Our life consists of various events and moments. They are never the same, they can be either good or bad, and for sure, everything that happened, our failures and achievements, can affect us in a different way. The way we react to them shows whether we are optimists or pessimists.

Our homework was to watch the video on the topic of attribution and motivation from our social psychology course and analyze our three performances.

Now I want to quickly revise what the video was about. The lecturer told about locus of control. It is a psychological concept that refers to how strongly people believe they have control over the situations and experiences that affect their lives. If a person has an inner locus of control, he explains the results of his activity by his own efforts, skills and talents. If a person has an external locus of control, he always finds external reasons for his successes and misadventures. Such people cannot admit that everything was in their hands, it is easier for them to blame other circumstances that do not depend from their actions.

Having a particular locus of control defines what motivation you have which can be either high or low. Those who have a high motivation they are inclined to praise themselves when they do something well, but they do not look for other factors that brought success to them. However, if they fail, they believe that they did not work hard enough to achieve their goal. As for individuals who have a low motivation, they point out good luck or bad luck as a thing that is responsible for their fiascos and accomplishments.

As it was mentioned earlier, one can react to events in a different way and explain them by different reasons. Those reasons can be:

1)    inner or external (I think it is clear);

2)    stable or temporary (e.g., a person may consider himself as miserable, useless and pathetic in a regular basis OR he may say that he was messed up only in a certain situation);

3)    controlled or uncontrolled (e.g., one can say that something bad that happened was beyond his power, whereas another can say that he was responsible for this failure and that he will try harder next time)

4)    universal or particular (e.g, a person can say that he is clever in general  or he can say that he has a good knowledge in Math only)

Optimists are usually more for inner, stable, controlled and universal reasons when they need to interpret their achievements, whereas pessimists are for external, temporary, uncontrolled and particular ones. If we talk about losses and downfalls, optimistic people suggest that bad situation is temporary and the problem is not connected with them. In this case, pessimists tend to judge themselves, because they believe that they always make trouble.

Now I would like to make an analysis of my three performances that I gave during our course of public speaking. Generally speaking, I think that I am a more pessimistic person rather than optimistic. I very often try to look for disadvantages in everything in my life, in my actions, literally in EVERYTHING. I understand it is a bad thing to do so, however I suppose that it is better to be a moderate pessimist than an absolute optimist. It is impossible to stay calm and happy when you clearly see that something is wrong. In my humble opinion, moderate pessimism or realism, how some people like to say, lets improve difficult situations. First of all, it is important to define a problem. Sadly, optimists sometimes pretend it does not exist and they just ignore it. Second of all, it is vital to take some actions about this issue. That is how I perceive moderate pessimism. I do not approve radical pessimism, it is disastrous, it does not bring any benefits.

Let us take a closer look at the first presentation. Actually, I think it was not that bad as I thought at the time the video was recorded. We had a homework to watch it and name three things we liked and did not like about our speech. I remember that I evaluated myself not so badly. It is strange that our brain works differently when we set a certain task to it. If we say “you have to find advantages of your performances, not only disadvantages as usual”, we still become more optimistic and then realize that we’ve done a good job. As I said before, I am a pessimist and I am usually not satisfied by everything I do, my mind always tries to find any drawbacks. Even though I named “pros” of this presentation, I still pointed out more “cons” such as lack of the constant eye contact, making so many pauses and mistakes, issues with my body language. These “cons” affect to my whole impression by my speech. I do not like it, though I think it was not the worst one. I guess it was kind of failure and I explain it only be inner and stable reasons. I know that it was all my fault that the performance was not successful. I did not prepare well enough, I did not have enough skills, I did not try hard enough. To be honest, I consider myself as a person who has a stage fright. I am sure that it is not an excuse for being a bad public speaker and I strongly believe that if I put more effort I could do it better. I admit that I control my actions and that I can improve my abilities and skills. I am quite optimistic about it. I can be overcritical about myself, though when I do something successfully I usually accept the fact it as all due to my efforts and talents.

As for the performancesI that I gave on “the conference of teachers”, I absolutely hate them. Both of them seem to me as fiascos, because there are so many things that I dislike about them: my posture, eye contact, pauses, stammering, movements and work with the audience. I know that I estimated the first video better than the second one, but it is only because bad is called good when worse happens. In my point of view, I think the first speech was better just because I sounded more or less natural and did not look as nervous as in the second video. Besides, I did not peep in my notes very often as in another performance. Here I judge only myself for this result, not other circumstances or external factors that did not let me do my best. 

The same does not go for my second presentation. We had an opportunity to improve our performances because we had more time to prepare it at home. I expected that I’d have given a better version of this speech. However, even though I understand that it was my responsibility to correct mistakes in my previous presentation, deep inside I still blame other external reasons for my misadventure. There were such thoughts in my head like: “Oh, I did not have enough time to “upgrade” it”; “Oh, I did not have the video of my first performance at that moment, that is why I could not see what to improve” (the video was recorded not in my phone); “Oh, I was so nervous because I was the last who gave a speech and I compared myself with all previous speakers”.  I even wrote in my post about the second video: “Unfortunately, my expectations did not become a reality”. It sounds like I could not control anything that time, hence I was not guilty at all. It is kind of a self-defense, I guess, but also it represents learned helplessness. I was pessimistic about all my presentations, so I was tired of explaining my failures by inner factors. Now I get that I should have tried harder and devoted more time to preparation everything would have been alright.

So, that is it for this post. I hope I will be more optimistic and more motivated to do all assignments next time.  Please, share your opinions about optimism and pessimism in the comments down below!